HELP! Weird OC on GTX 950?

[QwerkyPengwen]

Hi. I am currently doing some overclocking on my Gigabyte GTX 950.
I am trying to overclock my GTX 950 but am unsure if it's working. When I apply a +100 overclock to the card, Valley and Heaven will both say that it's running at that overclock speed which is 1492 (1392 when left at default) but HWMonitor and the built in monitor of Afterburner say that it's running way less than that (around 1.2 - 1.3Ghz) so I am a little confused as to whether or not I am actually getting the speed that is displayed in Valley/Heaven or if it's lying to me and I am not pushing more than 1300Mhz. The clock seems to fluctuate a lot between the 1.2 and 1.3 range in HWMonitor and Afterburner. Any help in understanding what's going on would be greatly appreciated. I have overclocked many times before but never on a GTX 950 or any PCIe powered cards for that matter and what I'm seeing happening is different than what I've experienced on regular cards that take power pin connectors.

Here is a screen shot of everything.
If you need any other info or different types of screenshots let me know.


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[weberdarren97]

There could be multiple reasons for this.

Let's start simple. The card has a power limit, a voltage limit, and a no load limit.

The power limit should be increased by at least 10% before expecting a stable overclock.

For such a modest overclock, I would leave the voltage alone.

Now for the no load limit. This one may seem complicated, but is rather simple once you get down to it. When the card is not experiencing enough of a load to need to boost, it will not boost. This means that if it's being held back by Vsync, Gsync, a slow CPU, or a game that doesn't have particularly complex graphics (like Rocket League or Undertale), it will not boost. When this happens, it will often times just ignore your overclock settings.

 

[QwerkyPengwen]

So what you're saying is that when I'm running valley on Max settings at 1080p and it says I'm at 1492 that's actually what I'm getting because of my oc and the monitors are just dumb? Or valley is not maxing out my card (which I find highly unlikely)
I should add that I've pushed the overclock to higher levels than that and valley will say that it's running at the overclocked speed but in the monitors it'll still say that it's running at the stock speeds. So I assume that I can't trust valley or heaven so what tool(s) should I use to properly measure what my overclock is running while under load so that I can more effectively try to overclock and find my sweet spot.

 

[weberdarren97]

So what you're saying is that when I'm running valley on Max settings at 1080p and it says I'm at 1492 that's actually what I'm getting because of my oc and the monitors are just dumb? Or valley is not maxing out my card (which I find highly unlikely)
I should add that I've pushed the overclock to higher levels than that and valley will say that it's running at the overclocked speed but in the monitors it'll still say that it's running at the stock speeds. So I assume that I can't trust valley or heaven so what tool(s) should I use to properly measure what my overclock is running while under load so that I can more effectively try to overclock and find my sweet spot.

Valley's clock speed measurements are not accurate. Trust Afterburner for that. Valley is only looking at what the card is set to, Afterburner will tell you what it's really doing.

Look through the many graphs on MSI Afterburner while running Valley. If the Power Limit, Voltage Limit, or No Load limit ever reach the top of the graph, then that limit needs increased.

To increase the power limit, simply drag the Power Limit slider to the right.

To increase the voltage limit, add 12mV to the current voltage setting. 12mV is 0.012 volts just so we're clear on that.

If it won't let you change the voltage, click on the gear to open Afterburner's settings. Click Unlock Voltage Control and try again.

If the No Load limit is reaching the top of its graph, then the reason your overclock is not doing too well is because the card is not being given enough work to need to boost.

Please note that synthetic benchmarks like Valley, Haven, 3DMark, etc. are not proper substitutes for actually playing your games. Often times, the no load limit will trigger sooner in synthetic benchmarks than it will when playing games.

 

[QwerkyPengwen]

I fiddled with it extensively and basically my stock clock is 1202 when under load and I can go up to a +240 offset but found that I start artifacting above +200. Changing the voltage does absolutely nothing so I've left it at stock with a +200 offset and noticed that it typically fluctuates up and down from 1300-1400 staying around 1350 on the average instead of at 1400 like it's set to. There shouldn't be any throttling either as it's not reaching anywhere near throttle temps and like I said adjusting voltage from 0-56 (which is the max offset for this card) does nothing to balance it out and I've set power limit to max +116 and prioritized temps which is set to 95c.

Nonetheless it's still more than stock and should help to offer some performance improvement. Next I'm going to see if it'll let me overclock the memory on it and try to get a little more umph.